If you have been in the world of RevOps for any meaningful period of time, you have likely experienced the pain/challenge of a poorly constructed data stack, and possibly a poor CPQ strategy. These are easy problems to create and very hard ones to solve. Moving fast and breaking things generally does not fall alongside taking your time and making everything talk to each other.

As leaders, we see this play out in a few different ways: a constantly changing approach to KPIs, siloed decision-making, and my personal favorite — business systems that don’t talk to one another, in violation of CPQ best practices.

In no other segment of the business has the “move fast, break things” approach been more damaging than in the world of quote-to-cash. At an early stage, there doesn't need to be a great process. The finance team buys a billing system, sets up its Excel spreadsheets, and runs the numbers. As the company scales and the company starts to experiment with pricing, they realize the Opportunity object and word-based contracts won't cut it anymore. 

“In no other segment of the business has the 'move fast, break things' approach been more damaging than in the world of quote-to-cash.” 

At this point the GTM team builds its own stack to solve this problem, either buying a contracting/Dealroom software with some CPQ functionality or stringing together a few systems with manual processes to create a Quoting process. 

Now your team needs to touch 3-4 systems for every deal…quickly leading to a runaway process and the creation of a deal desk. Ultimately, this CPQ strategy further slows down your Sales team.

Enter the traditional CPQ — a system billed as an easy one-stop-shop for all your quoting needs, with the ability to scale your price book up and down and configure incredibly complex sales processes. Once operational, it is a true game changer for many businesses, enabling many aspects of the sales process to be faster, more accurate, and better from the customer side.

However, the word operational ends up doing a LOT of work here. One small misdiagnosis during discovery can lead to an unusable implementation and most CPQ systems have a 12-24 week implementation time, and that's for a pretty simple implementation! This leads to many (up to 35%) of CPQ implementations failing entirely, costing hundreds of thousands in real dollars and often millions in productivity. 

“One small misdiagnosis during discovery can lead to an unusable implementation.” 

Even once operational, these systems can cause problems if they don’t follow CPQ best practices — namely, if they’re not woven directly into the billing platforms and have an easy renewal/expansion motion built in. While new business scales unabated using its amazing new quoting solution, your CS and Finance teams are left scrambling to review and recreate each order… meaning hours of lost productivity that could be used to help expand your client relationships!

1. Easy, Accurate Subscription Management Matters

Subscription management is critical in today's world. As companies gear more and more of their business towards efficient growth, the focus has shifted almost entirely from Net New to LTV (emphasizing land and expands). The right subscription management tool can help you achieve that goal by providing a streamlined and efficient process for managing subscriptions. 
 
This means everything from onboarding new customers to managing their accounts and providing support throughout their subscription period. And let's not forget about accurate billing and timely renewals, which can reduce the risk of customer churn.
 
But it's not just about retaining customers. The right tool will provide a full view of the entire customer lifecycle, giving your team a true platform to conquer land and expand. You should be able to not only manage renewals but also quickly and easily co-term product expansions, and add or remove seats without the need for manual intervention by finance. 
 
It's critical for the right tool to enable your team — because the wrong tool can cost your GTM and finance teams hours of productivity, while the right tool can help give you a better understanding of what your customers want and need, which can help inform product development and marketing strategies.

2. CRM Native CPQ Is Critical

Pull up a chair behind your sales rep for a day, and you’ll find that they live and breathe through their CRM. They bounce between views and pages — and, over time, get very good at navigating their system. They gain huge efficiencies by using the same tool all day every day.

“Pull up a chair behind your sales rep for a day, and you’ll find that they live and breathe through their CRM.” 

When you add a new tool to your business’s tech stack, reps have to start from scratch. You lose all of their system expertise and create a huge source of frustration by adding another new tool to learn, when they spent months, if not years, figuring out their old system.

Not to mention, if you add on a tool with built-in formulas or rigid rules, they’ll end up confused as to how to adapt these to their existing quoting system. What about upsells? Renewals? That existing pricing quirk that is great for your overall margins? Impossible. The result? Lower adoption rates.

For teams to scale past this quagmire of mediocre revenue process, they need a system that works end-to-end. For most SaaS companies today that means a system that enables both product-led and sales-led growth: a full PLG motion through their website, while giving their enterprise sellers a way to structure complex deals quickly without lots of back and forth. 

The modern CPQ needs to take into account not only how the product will be billed but how it will be renewed. Subscription management matters, it's not a standalone product, it needs to be a part of your quote-to-cash tool, and if it isn’t you are setting yourself up for nothing but pain. 

To truly build a system for scale, you need to buy for the company you will be… not the company you are. Don’t buy a tool without a plan and certainly don't buy a platform if you aren't sure how it will scale with you. Bring everyone in on the sales process (Sales, CS, Finance, and RevOps) and ensure the new system doesn't just check the boxes but actually fulfills the need, meeting key CPQ best practices along the way.